Why Your Demo Should Be Part of Your Sales Tech Stack

Sales teams have several tools to meet their sales needs. However, most do not focus on better demos. Sales teams can capture more revenue by showing better demos to already engaged prospects. Given this, Jonathan Friedman, CEO and co-founder, Demostack, discusses the tools sales reps should have to provide better demos.

Recent research by Miller Heiman GroupOpens a new window shows the average sales team has ten tools in their tech stack, with plans to add up to four more. The vast majority of these tools focus on the typical sales needs of outreach, lead generation, relationship management, and reporting.  

While all revenue teams must capture and engage their leads effectively, the entire goal of the sales process is to show your prospects a demo. The demo is the most pivotal part of any selling process. It is the crescendo of your sales symphony, with all prospecting, development, and discovery activities leading up to the demo before tapering into negotiation and closing.

So why haven’t we enabled better demos yet? Effectively, we have empowered sellers to generate more demos faster without actually giving them a way to better execute on said meetings. Sure, more volume will generate more wins, but what if you can capture more revenue simply by giving better demos to the prospects you have already engaged?

That is why it is time we start shifting attention towards empowering sellers to deliver more effective demos that close more deals faster.

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Here are some tools to do that.

Demo Discovery Tools

In sales, it is important to help your prospects visualize their end-state. It is also crucial to create a consensus around shared goals so you can work towards their ideal outcome. Making proper discoveries is vital to winning a deal. If you do not have a deep understanding of what the customer is looking to solve, your demo will likely miss the mark. It should be tailored to their exact use case, but you cannot uncover that without asking the right questions upfront.

When starting the discovery or demo process, use a shared document or chart to help visualize needs, wants, and goals. Documenting these findings from discovery is crucial, particularly when you have multiple teams or people involved internally to close a deal. Team selling platforms can help streamline this information so that, for instance, when a sales engineer is brought into a deal at a later stage, they have got all the context on the deal from the discovery that is already done by the AE.

Demo Coaching Tools

Now commonplace in many tech stacks, conversation intelligence platforms analyze spoken engagements to identify coaching opportunities. 

When it comes to the demo, the benefit is twofold. Account executives can review past conversations to properly arm themselves, even if they have not personally spoken to the prospect. Then, the recording can be reviewed, used for coaching, or shared with others for feedback. The files can also be passed on to customer success to maintain a consistent customer experience.  

Taking this a step further, there are coaches that focus specifically on demo delivery that can go more in-depth with your team members on areas for improvement. Whether these are call recordings or mock demo presentations, having an expert review of how your reps run a demo can help uncover where it is falling flat. 

Demo Experience Platforms

Specifically created to help your sellers deliver better demos, a demo experience platform is your next sales must-have. These platforms replace your in-house instance, eliminating the massive amount of resource drain from your engineering team. Instead, a demo experience platform creates a clone of your product. It looks, feels, and acts like the real thing, yet it is completely detached from any backend that could cause issues.

Then, they provide sellers with the ability to completely customize every aspect of the demo to each individual prospect. From company names and logos to users and even numbers and charts, you can show every potential user exactly what it will look like when they log in. 

Tailoring the story to your buyer helps them visualize how their specific business would use your product and gain value from it. Consider it like staging your home before putting it on the market. When you stage it with stylish furniture, fresh-cut flowers, and the smell of warm cookies straight out of the oven, it sells faster and for top dollar. Why? Because the buyer can visualize what it would be like to make this house their home. The same goes for your software demo — if you can make them feel immersed in a tailored product story, you are much more likely to win that deal. 

This personalization and ability to tell better product stories actually enables sellers to deliver more effective demos that win more deals, resulting in higher win rates and squeezing more out of the pipeline you already have.

Demo Leave-behinds

If you have just given a killer demo, you will want to build upon that momentum after the call. Enabling your champion with the right assets is crucial, not only to make it easier for them to make a decision but also to gain buy-in from other stakeholders that were not on the call. 

Sharing a leave-behind demo environment can work wonders to accelerate a deal after the live demo. Your buyer can get their hands on your product faster. If you have already tailored the product story with a demo experience platform, you can then provide access to that environment so they can explore on their own time. 

Instead of a trial environment that is an empty skeleton of your product where they could easily get lost, you are enabling them with a demo environment customized to their business, so your value proposition becomes a no-brainer.

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Learning Management Systems

Sellers give better demos and win more deals when they can act as experts who guide their prospects to the best solution for them through consultative selling. But, because they are so busy, AEs do not always have time to keep up to date on the latest trends and information.

That is why learning management systems allow sales teams to store, organize, and share crucial content and information that empower sellers. Moreover, they make it searchable and highly consumable so reps can find the information they require exactly when they need it. 

With that, it is time to stop worrying about generating more at-bats and focus on capitalizing on the ones you already have. Empower your sellers to deliver better product demos and watch your win rate go up and to the right.

Do you have a demo toolbox as part of your sales efforts? What tools do you have in it? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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